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ll I could do was blink at the infuriated face so close to me that every pore on his mottled skin stood out in stark contrast.

His shout rattled through my brain, but neurons refused to grasp onto their meaning.

You killed my son! You killed my son! You killed my son!

I blinked. “Ben doesn’t… have any brothers.”

He only had a little sister, Gina.

But… Ben’s dad should know that, right?

Chief Pierce fisted the front of the borrowed sweatshirt, shaking me hard enough to rattle my teeth, especially since Officer Jones—helpful as he was—released my shoulders so I could take the full brunt of his boss’s rage. “You stupid little bitch! How did you do it? How did you do it?”

Spittle flew from his mouth and landed on my cheek.

“Do what?”

“I want my son back! I want him back! Do you fucking hear me, you piece of trash? I want him back!”

“Someone help me!” Reeves grunted nearby, but Chief Pierce occupied all of my vision and attention. “Get his hands. Pull.”

Some of the cloudiness faded from Pierce’s eyes as he refocused on me. “How did you do it?” He rattled me. “Huh? How the fuck did you do it?”

“Do what?” I repeated, crying out as he slapped me across the cheek hard enough that my entire body went cold and my head snapped to the side.

Any harder, and he might have cracked my neck. Stars dotted my vision, almost turning it white.

A slew of slurs and expletives rose at the violent action as more hands joined in to separate us.

In the far corner of the room, I thought I saw a flash of a shimmery form, but it was too faint and too fast to be sure, and then Ben’s dad had gripped my jaw and turned me to face him.

“Answer! Me! How did you kill Ben?”

More than a little dazed from the hit, my brain still refused to internalize the reality of what he was saying.

“I what?” My words came out slurred. “What did you say?” I gave a slow blink, trying to get my eyes to stop moving. When I focused, I don’t think I managed to quite meet Chief Pierce’s gaze, or if I did, it wasn’t for long. My eyes kept sliding to the left, like an egg on a slick frying pan. “Ben’s what?”

Chief Pierce released an inarticulate sound of raw, unadulterated rage and agony. It sent chills racing over my skin, and I knew I’d never forget that sound to my dying day. He went to hit me again, and this time I was sure I saw a white flare from the corner of my eye. His fist landed, delivering a blow that rattled my brain before he was tackled away by the force of all four of his officers.

As they struggled, tears welled in my eyes. “B-Ben’s dead?”

The room spun.

No one answered, as they were all too busy trying to shout over one another to calm their boss down.

Louder, and a lot shriller, I repeated, “Ben’s dead?”

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” the chief bellowed, fighting with all he had as they wrestled him from the room. “I wish I was the one to find you in the woods! I’d have strangled you with my bare hands!”

Muffled, his rage and grief still reached me through the closed door, sending me into spasms that made it hard to catch my breath. An ax pressed on the middle of my chest, determined to cleave it in two. “No, no, no, no, no.”

Ben couldn’t be dead.

That…

Except, that had to make sense, because how else…

My head pounded, and I turned and threw up into a trash can someone hurriedly held out. Every heave made my eyes pulse with red-hot pain until black circles danced across my vision.

“No, no, no. Ben’s my boyfriend. He can’t be dead.”

But…

Everything that’d happened hit me with stark clarity, from seeing him in my mindscape to my too easy escape from the hospital just in time to avoid being killed.

He wasn’t a figment of my imagination.

I dry heaved into the trash again, nauseous but empty.

Blinking to focus on an increasingly blurring room, I locked eyes on Reeves. He’d returned. He was the one holding the trash can for me. “How?”

Reeves only debated answering me for a split second. “Car accident. His brake lines were cut.”

“No, no, no,” I whined, hugging myself tightly and rocking in the chair.

“She’s faking it,” someone added from the side.

“Yeah, totally,” Reeves growled with a harsh grunt, but Officer Jones ignored his sarcasm.

“Yeah. Buyer’s remorse. See it all the time. She hired someone to make her look like a victim and give her an alibi and then paid him to kill the chief’s son.”

I flinched with a pitiful moan, tears trailing down my cheeks.

“You’re delusional,” Reeves barked, leaning down to catch my gaze, but my eyes kept drifting. “You can’t fake this.”

“Oh, I’m not saying she isn’t sad she lost her fuck buddy, but she still could have done it all, set the plans in motion, and now regrets having done it. Doesn’t make her less guilty.”

“Yeah, well, it’s all moot now. We have no evidence to make this stick.”

“Fine, we can just send her back to juvie.”

“You’re kidding, right? We’ll be lucky if we still have a department next week. There’s no way we’ll have any standing after Chief nearly killed her in custody.”

Jones shrugged. “Evidence can be lost. Things happen. A lot like the footage at the psych ward around the time she escaped.”

The footage was gone?

I blinked. That seemed important.

“Yeah, except there were two attorneys watching the live interrogation. I’m sure they’d love to have a go at us. That’d make their name—not to mention Chief’s parting threat that was overheard by at least six visitors and every employee, including our tenderhearted secretary.”

Why would erased footage of my escape be important?

Come on, brain, think .

Oh, right, because it wasn’t just my escape they would have seen. They would have seen the man who showed up to kill me.

The… mayor.

But… they wouldn’t believe me about that. They thought I’d killed Ben, and with no footage…

Helplessness weighed me down.

If he was the man who had cut my brake lines, then he’d probably done the same to… to Ben.

Oh, wait…

“Guest logs,” I slurred, interrupting their argument.

Reeves’s head canted. “What?”

“Guest logs. Someone tried. Kill me. Signed in. That’s why. Escape.”

Reeves frowned. “Something’s wrong.”

The world shifted. Hands landed on my shoulders to help right me. “Guest log. Talked to nurses. Could be. Ben’s killer.”

“We need to get her to a hospital. Now. ”

As Jones left the room, probably to make a call, I lifted a fumbling hand to place it on Reeves’s shoulder. “Guest log.”

He nodded. “Okay. Guest log.”

That was all I needed to hear.

For what had to be the thousandth time, I blacked out.

“Willa?” Dad’s voice pulled me into consciousness. “Come on, sweetie. Wake up.”

I blinked, staring up at the dull, textured tiles of a hospital room. “Dad?”

“Yes, we’re here, honey.” His warm, calloused palm engulfed mine. “Actually, your mom and brother are here too.”

His voice sounded off.

“Are you okay?” I asked, trying to blink away the fuzzy vision.

A watery chuckle escaped him. “Am I okay? Willa, are you okay?”

Every time my eyelids slid down over my eyeballs, it felt like a pass of gritty sandpaper. “Everything’s blurry.”

“That’s normal,” Mom’s voice explained, joining the conversation. She sounded subdued but professional, the tone she used when talking with a patient just after the doctor dropped bad news. “You have a severe hematoma.”

“Yeah, you look like a raccoon, sis, or an extra from a zombie movie.”

I huffed as a smile danced on my lips, feeling the sharp sting that said I’d just reopened a split lip. “Nick.”

“Don’t make your” —Mom’s voice wavered as emotion overwhelmed her— “sister laugh, Nick.”

“Right.” Nick’s voice held subdued apology, and my concern took a sharp spike at how serious he sounded.

We never took each other seriously.

Ever.

My chin trembled. “Dad?”

“It’s okay, dear. It’s okay.” He squeezed my hand. “Your mom said they put some numbing drops in your eyes, and that’s probably what is messing with your eyesight. Everything will be fine.”

“What happened?”

A pregnant pause followed before Mom spoke, her voice turned in Dad’s direction. “Dear, would you like to take Nick down to the cafeteria? It’s about lunchtime.”

“But—” Nick began.

“I want Dad.” The words blurted out, unplanned, and hung in the silence like a guillotine poised above our necks. My immediate reaction was to recant the needy statement, but I couldn’t forget the annoyed tone Dad had taken with her when she agreed to send me to the psychiatric ward.

It was unfair to the nth degree. She couldn’t have known, but I’d nearly been killed there.

“Um. Oh. Are you… Are you sure?”

I nodded instead of answering, feeling a twinge in my neck.

“Is… Is that okay with you, Robert?”

“Yes, dear. I might not know all the medical terminology like you, but I think I can repeat what you explained to us earlier. I’ll be a glorified parrot.”

“Okay,” she replied, her voice small. Her footsteps faded as she left the room in a hurry.

Nick lingered long enough to say, “Wow, sis,” before Dad shooed him out as well.

I focused on Dad’s dark form as he shifted in his seat.

At length, he said, “Do you want to talk about that?”

My head shook in the negative.

“Fair enough. So you were admitted to the hospital four days ago. They put you in a medically induced coma. You had to undergo minor surgery to relieve the pressure on your brain. They said there might be some memory lapses—”

“Wait, wait. Coma? Brain surgery? I had brain surgery ?”

“Minor,” Dad assured me, scooting closer. “They only shaved a small part of your hair to drill a small hole. You were in and out in under an hour. “And it was necessary. They originally wanted to see if the swelling would go down on its own, which was why they induced the coma, but you started seizing, so they had no choice but to operate.”

Dad glanced over my shoulder at the silent heart rate monitor. “We should take a break.”

I looked too, unable to see the details to know how fast my heart was beating. It felt fast though. “No, please? I want to know.”

He heaved a sigh that moved his entire blurry shape. “What do you remember?”

Getting sucker punched by the chief of police?

Then I remembered why, and my chest concaved. “ Ben. ”

Dad gripped my hand tighter. “Okay, yeah. You remember.”

“It’s true?” I held onto him like a lifeline, drawing on his physical presence and warmth to tether me when I felt so lost. “He’s…”

I couldn’t even finish the sentence.

“I’m afraid so, sweetie. The brakes on his truck gave out—” Dad choked off, and anger colored his tone. “I should have checked them. I’m a damn mechanic. He asked me for help with his truck before. I should have known.”

Dad’s grief washed over me, threatening to drown me, but my mind picked up on his wording.

His brake lines gave out ?

That wasn’t what they’d said at the station. I remembered that part loud and clear. It was why I used every shred of strength I had to make sure they knew to check the visitor sign in at Vedault, because my brake lines had also been cut.

What had they told my family?

A slice of anger stabbed through me. Dad was blaming himself when Ben’s brakes had been sabotaged.

“No, Dad. No. Y-You couldn’t have known, and you always helped him. Always . Even when his own father brushed him off, you were there for Ben. H-He… He idolized you.”

“Sweetie, look at me. You’re the one who was dating him, and you’ve been through so much. I’m sorry. This is inappropriate, but damn, that boy just made himself at home in our family. He was too young. Your age. He—It—”

“It’s okay,” I whispered.

“No, it’s not. Look, I—I can do this, but we’ve been so scared. You were out for a long time.”

Since Dad hadn’t dropped into a homicidal rage, not even a little, I had to assume Ben’s brake lines weren’t the only thing they’d fudged. I cleared my throat. “Uh, what happened after they told me about Ben is a little fuzzy. Can you help me remember? Like my head. What happened?”

“You hit your head in the hospital, got confused, and ran off to the woods. You were lucky you survived that long. Maybe Ben’s ghost was watching over you,” he joked with a painful, watery laugh, none the wiser that his failed attempt at humor shot a zing of awareness up my spine.

Ben isn’t gone.

Not only that, but I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Ben wasn’t just not gone, he was here, right now, even if I couldn’t see or hear him.

Too much of what’d happened couldn’t be written off as coincidence. The subconscious mind constantly picked up on stimuli from the environment. In reality, people with uncanny intuition and gut instincts had just trained themselves to trust the information their brain had processed without them realizing it.

There was no way, though, I could have known about someone being on their way to visit me at Vedault that late at night.

There was no way.

I trusted that instinct in me right now. I wasn’t sure how, but Ben’s ghost had reached out to me to save my life that day, and he wasn’t entirely gone yet.

He was here, in this room, standing guard while I recovered, watching us grieve.

Then, in the next instant, the faint buzz of his presence disappeared.

He’d left.

I rubbed my chest with the hand attached to the IV.

Dad recounted the fabricated story the police had cooked up. Considering there’d been paramedics involved in the rescue team and probably medical reports, the fact that they thought they could get away with saying I’d injured myself while at Vedault and still managed to run six miles into the woods…

It was a terrifying thought—not to mention the witnesses at the station.

Reeves said there’d been visitors as well as attorneys.

Were the police as crooked as the mayor?

The breath froze in my lungs.

Were they connected?

“Anyway,” Dad continued, “the construction site owner felt so bad about your injury that he’s dropping all charges. Once the doctor clears you here, you’ll be going home, which is good because we miss you like crazy, little bug. Won’t that be nice?”

“Yeah, nice,” I croaked.

The biggest problem wasn’t my recovery, though, or even the only problem. To name a few, the mayor of Fairview wanted me dead, the police were involved with him, and…

And how in the world was I supposed to carry on when it felt like my heart had been crushed into jagged fragments that cut my chest with each breath?

That was the most important.

Kolton would be shattered.

And Ben’s little sister, Gina!

How could I cope with this constant guilt and loneliness, knowing Ben wouldn’t be dead if he’d never met me?

I’d just as good as killed him myself.

I’d killed my boyfriend.